This is the story of an iPad business app designed for meeting reports, iTakeNotes. It's an entrepreneurial story and an experience sharing on how to develop and market an app to the App Store.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

What is the real impact of keywords on the app store?

You have a great app but how the millions of iPad users will now that it does exist? If they don't know, how can they find you on the app store? We developed a meeting report app, but how will user know that there is a meeting report app?

Two ways: either you are very visible on the app store, a probability that comes very close to winning the national lottery, either you have found the magic keywords.

If this happens to you with keywords, wake up, you're dreaming

Magic keywords combine both a very high search by the users AND a very high ranking of your app in the search results. Needless to say that even Hogwarts best students won't find out the magic keywords for your app.

So here's my advise: find the right keywords for your app, don't spend too much time on it and most importantly try not to mess up that process.

Finding the best keywords for your app: take your app main feature with the umbrella principle in mind. It's raining outside, you need to go out, what are the first words that come to your mind? "rain", "wet", "umbrella" and so on.

For iTakeNotes, we came with meeting, meeting report, minutes, notes, conference,... Those words are close concepts to our app main features. And we did it in english, french, spanish...

Don't play keyword strategy too long

And that's enough. Seriously.

There are so many things to do to market your app, no need to spend more time on it. Think of it: you're not alone, thousand of smart developers are out there and came with the same ideas. If you are familiar with game theory, you will realize that keywords are just too basic marketing to help you differentiate your app.

But still don't mess up your keywords. On the app store there is no coming back i.e. once your keywords are set, you will not be able to change them unless you make a new app release.

There is no second chance for keywords on the App Store

Now a few useful links:
- How to deal with keywords on App Store: check out Noel Chenier article on its blog, very useful
- The most used keywords: very interesting article by Bryson Meunier on Searchengineland
- A very interesting slideshare on the subject can also be found here